Grant: Doctoral Award - Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarships

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) costs Canadians over $40 billion annually in decreased productivity and increased health care utilization. Depression and Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) commonly co-occur with PTSD and result in substantial additional costs. Military personnel are typically screened for PTSD immediately post-deployment, often too early for symptom detection. Significant distress and impairment typically occurs before these individuals present for treatment, necessitating immediate access to effective, evidence-based treatment (EBT). EBTs for PTSD result in full remission in up to 80% of patients who complete treatment and include Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE), and medication. Those matched to their treatments of choice are more likely to commence treatment and have lower dropout rates. Since PTSD treatment preference studies have been conducted primarily on undergraduate students and ignored comorbidities, it is currently unknown what PTSD treatments military veterans prefer and if comorbidities affect their choices. This gap in the literature will be addressed by surveying veterans' PTSD treatment preferences and the impact of their comorbid symptoms on their choices. Veterans will be surveyed from the Veterans Affairs Canada Operational Stress Injury National Network's (OSINN) nine clinics, the largest providers of PTSD treatment to veterans in Canada. Three hypotheses will be tested: (1) Canadian veterans will choose CPT most frequently for the treatment of PTSD symptoms; (2) increases in comorbid symptoms will result in a decrease of preference for PE and increase in preference for medication; and (3) higher comorbid symptoms will result in an increase in preference for combination of CPT and medication. Understanding veterans' treatment preferences will potentially allow clinicians to streamline the treatment matching process, reduce dropout rates, and ultimately improve the mental health of Canadians.